A good software executive or manager will foster meritocracy, will have a good ability for followup, and will scan the environment for opportunities to innovate, whether it’s looking at new techniques related to the current software project or assist the business stakeholders in finding and prioritizing more processes that can be automated.

The “people” approach can be different, but what they value on the workplace is actually the same, at least in my industry. We foster multi-country teams within the same project whenever possible. It helps you build a company culture that crosses through office locations and helps the traveling folks feel at home in all the offices when travel is needed.

Have you found other characteristics that are important to software managers? Share in the comments section.

Well, I mentioned I’d attach a bluetooth keyboard to the iPad to try it out and that’s exactly what I did. The results are better than with the regular keyboard but still not ideal.

Of course typing with a real keyboard is going to feel great. The problem is that it’s just field typing. On most of the apps, tabs don’t work to move from field to field, and the PageUp/PageDown keys on the small apple bluetooth keyboard (Fn and Up/Down) are not wired in at all.

All the media function keys, however (from the brightness controls of F1&2 to the media and volume controls on F7 through F12) work fine. Which underscores the idea that this is a media consumption device more than a production device.

Have you ever seen a stream of data coming from a network, and it has some European accented characters in an encoding you don’t recognize? Sometimes bad coding practices or assumptions about encoding when pasting into documents make the encoding on the file not match all or part of the encoding of a document. This is a quick way to find out what encoding(s) match.

It’s not fully automated, it still requires your eyes. But it can make a difference when you’re writing parsing code and you don’t know what to do with some edge cases. Maybe some code like this coupled with a spell checker inside the loop would give you some sense of automation.

Now run it and you will have a poor man’s monitor, kind of like top but for MySQL. That coupled with screen (or multiple terminals) may give you some quick and easy piece of mind.

This should give you *a lot* of monitoring automation ideas. It should be easy to put together a shell script that puts it all in a little “important things panel” to use watch on. Sometimes that’s all you need.